[yocto] externalsrc + sstate why is not compatible?

[Alexander Kanavin]

On 12/06/2017 04:15 AM, Koehler, Yannick wrote:
> In our situation, we have many packages that are in-house, as such we
>  use a local folder for the several in-house modules.  To do so, we
> need to use externalsrc to point to the local code so that the git
> repo contains both the code + recipe, instead of 20 repos (1 per
> packages) and 1 more for yocto recipe which complicates things when
> you want to submit a change.

You don't have to have 20 repos. You can place the modules into a single
repo with subdirs.

> Yet, the externalsrc disable the setscene tasks and set the
> BB_DONTCACHE variable.  I altered the script to remove those but then
> a change to the externalsrc folder is not detected. I wonder if it is
> because the S variable is set past the sstate algorithm and is then
> unable to consider the externalsrc folder as the real source
> location.  Any expert on this matter that can guide me to either make
> sstate works for external src or teach me how to have code + recipe
> in a single git repo.  I am certainly not the only case using such a
> pattern.

The bitbake documentation claims you can specify a directory in the 
file: fetcher, and then all of it will be unpacked to workdir. I've 
never seen or tried it myself, but maybe you can investigate in that 
direction, and make it work if it doesn't.

Alex